Why is everybody always picking on me?

Trump Steaks.  One of the many failed products sold with "the Donald's" name, for which he got paid for the use of his name.  Were they good?  I have no clue.  Given a choice, I'd rather spend the same money and go to either Gallagher's Steakhouse in Manhattan, or Peter Luger's in Brooklyn.  At least, in these two restaurants, I know I'd get a better steak than anything Trump could sell to me.

It is Trump's attitude of selling the sizzle and not the steak that worries me.  His followers know he's lying to them, and they don't care.  He has brought issues into public debate which the GOP elite would rather not address. And the elites are now trying to figure out a way to prevent him from winning the nomination, so that they have a chance of retaining some political power. As for me, I want to see him trash the GOP's structure and collapse the party.  Trump has no real plan.  Trump has no governing philosophy.  And Trump has no ethics.  He's dangerously close to winning the GOP nomination, and that poses a great risk to our republic.

With all this being said, the GOP gets what it sows.  They have given lunatic religious fundamentalists power, and these Christianists have used their bully pulpits to attack the GLBTIQ communities across the United States.  Strangely enough, Trump is a moderate compared to the rest of his party.  People know that he has supported Planned Parenthood, Obamacare, and other positions which are in conflict with the GOP platform. And they don't care. They want the sizzle, because they know they won't get the steak. And Trump is just the candidate who will give them that sizzle.

The GOP elite first wanted Jeb Bush, and then shifted to Marco Rubio.  The public rejected those clowns. However, it is a race between Trump and Ted Cruz to see whether one or the other will get the nomination.  Sadly, the elite will tolerate Cruz, even when he will do much more damage to their ticket than Trump will.  Can you see people voting for a theocracy, as Cruz would have (but would never openly say it)?  At least, Trump has a chance of winning against Hillary....

Sadly, Trump's lies are more palatable than Ted Cruz's lies.  It looks like the GOP may just self-destruct instead of figuring out a way to control Trump.  And I fear what is likely to happen if the GOP loses the election, as I expect they will....

Trump - Off the deep end!

Joe Scarborough is a conservative host on a network that has leaned to the left. And he has said that he can not support Donald Trump because of Trump's refusal to disavow the endorsement of David Duke, former head of the KKK.  Sadly, Joe's outrage, and the outrage of the GOP elite is too little, too late.  The only chance that Trump can be stopped is if the Democrats put up a winning candidate.

Sadly, Hillary Clinton is a weak candidate.  Even worse, in an election where the public (for the most part) wants to vote to "throw the bums out", Hillary represents the interests of the ruling elite.  In the past 30+ years, the elite of both parties have praised the benefits of globalization, without providing a safety net for the structural unemployment that this trend would create.  Neither political party has given a damn about the growing inequality between the working class and the wealthy elite.  In fact, people like Trump have said that our national minimum wage is too high.  Too high?!?!?!?  When I was young, minimum wage was enough for a person to feed his/her family and put a roof over their heads.  Now, a person working minimum wage would be lucky to be able to take care of one person's needs while working 3 jobs!

Where was the outrage in the GOP when Trump insulted Mexican-Americans?  Where was the outrage when Trump insulted Muslims?  Where was the outrage when he acted like a bully, destroying healthy political discourse?  Sadly, the GOP reaps what it sows, and may possibly fall apart as the Whigs did in the 1800's.  And this would be a healthy thing, if centrists were to regain control of the party.  Unfortunately, I don't see that happening.

Recently, Chris Christie came out in support of Trump.  What will he get for his endorsement?  We now have bombastic blowhards who have seduced a large part of society in the hope that a "fearless leader" can "Make America Great Again."  We've seen what happened in Central Europe did this in the 1930's.  

Why do I mention Central Europe?  Two things happened today that give me pause for concern.  At my office, two people were having a political conversation (both moderates) about Trump, and got concerned about my overhearing their chat - as if I were a Trump supporter.  They were pleasantly surprised to find out that Jimmy Kimmel, Matthew Broderick, and Nathan Lane did a spoof of "The Producers", and that I had a sense of humor.  Instead of being worried about being open around me, they became relaxed because they found out I may have the same sense of shock that Trump is a viable candidate for the GOP nomination.  And then, on the way to the railroad station's parking lot (on the way back to my car), one woman and I had a more serious conversation, both of us seeing the parallels between the USA and Weimar Germany.  

How can Trump be defeated?  One can't do it by being mean.  He's a mean person, and can out do any civilized person who has any sense of ethics.  But he can be defeated - by humor.  If people laugh at him, make fun of him, he will lose power each time a person laughs.  One of my favorite spoofs at the expense of Trump came with a person echoing Trump's words from a South Carolina speech with a "gay voice". Once you hear these words coming out of someone else's mouth, you'll realize how insane these words sound. And the clip is funny - unlike Trump....

We have an important choice to make in November.  But the work to make sure that dysfunctional leaders don't get elected starts now.....

Thoughts on a Supreme Court Justice

In fairness, I did not want to malign this man (whose opinions I usually disagreed with), but to note his importance to America.  Yet, I had to choose a picture whose tone best fit what people thought of the man - for better and worse. So I chose a monochrome image of Scalia, as he tended to see things in Black or White, and not with the conflicting nuances that many people live with.

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This justice was a devout Catholic, a person who took 6 day creation as real (from what I've heard - which may or may not be entirely accurate). His life and his court decisions were influenced by his lack of doubt about anything.  And this is where I fault the late justice.

One of the things I learned in Grad School was the idea of "Transformative Learning".  This process involved a person doubting one of his/her core beliefs, and developing a completely different world view after examining the facts and testing his/her beliefs.  From what I can tell, Scalia never had a transformative learning experience, as none of the reports I've recently read note that he had doubts about his beliefs.

Please note that I am not out to trash this man or his legacy.  I have much to criticize about his believe in "Originalism" - it lends itself to the same intellectual stagnation found in many ultra-orthodox followers of religious faiths.  They tend to argue over minor points, but never question whether the big answers provided to them are really indicative of a true right or wrong. Dogma is more important than what any law is supposed to provide for a society - a way to determine what is the right or wrong thing to do for the average person who has no time to learn all the details....

Why is this important?

As much as I dislike what Scalia stood for, I have to grant him credit for being consistent in the application of his core beliefs. But I fear having another person without doubt in any position of power. I'd have wanted for Truman to question whether dropping the A-Bomb on Hiroshima was the right thing to do, and then justify it to himself by the number of lives s shortened war would have saved.  Can we afford to have another dogmatic person on the Supreme Court?  I doubt it.

At the time I write this entry, the president hasn't nominated a successor to Scalia, nor has the Senate indicated any willingness to hold a vote on any nominated candidate. The GOP has signaled a desire to roll the dice and wait until the next president is in charge, where there will be a 50-50 possibility of the GOP putting in a radical judge.  However, Obama could make a recess appointment (which I find doubtful for the time remaining in the week of 2/15-2/21) of an extreme liberal - who would be on the court until the end of the term, and be a deciding vote in the more divisive of potential decisions.  Or, he could nominate a moderate, and let the GOP take the heat for not giving the person a quick vote. Either way, the public is now aware of how important the Supreme Court is to America.

Would we be better had Scalia lived?

The answer to this question depends on which political party you belong to, and what your core values are.  I want the court stacked with social moderates - people beholding to neither political party, and who will check and balance the extremes of our elected leadership.  Do I think this will happen? Maybe - if we're lucky....

Eisenhower warned us of the Military-Industrial Complex....

What does it take to abandon a project?  The basics of good project management teaches us that some projects fail, and the best thing to do is to kill those projects early, before they take on lives of their own.  In the case of the F-35 jet, the idea of a fighter jet that could be used by all services sounded good, but failed miserably in practice.

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The first mistake was to assume that one plane could be used by all services.  Ideally, there would be a significant percentage of parts that could be used in planes built for each of the services.  But the final configurations would be very different - customization on a small scale, and not "one size fits all".  No one thought of the trade-offs to use a single plane.  No one thought - too many stake holders make a project fail.

The next mistake was to get the plane up and flying, and then apply continuous modifications to the jest in the field.  We saw this in the automobile industry years ago with recalls - where bad design made it to the customers' driveways, and then the cars had to be fixed by the local dealerships at much greater cost.  "Agile" project management techniques ares inappropriate for a fighter jet, yet some people are using the principle to "save money and time" - when it is totally inappropriate.

The A-10 jet is very good at what it does, and will be kept flying until the F-35 is retrofitted enough to do the job the A-10 does as well as the A-10 does it.  The B-52 bomber also does its job better than any of the replacements designed to take its place - and there are no plans to retire this work horse of our air fleet.  In fact, there are father/sons who have flown the same plane, and there may soon be a grandfather/father/son combination as well.

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So where am I going?

As I write this, New Hampshire has just had its Presidential primary, and the two "anti establishment" leaders (Trump and Sanders) won.  Americans are totally pissed off at a government which no longer functions as needed, and they are giving our ruling elite a vote of no confidence.  Using examples such as the F-35 jet (whose parts are made all across the country to give as many congressmen as possible a stake in preserving the project), it is obvious that the elite is no longer able to make the hard decisions needed to keep this country healthy. We need leaders who could scuttle projects like the F-35 jet, even though people would be put out of work nationwide by these actions.

Our problem as Americans is simple - how do we determine who we can trust?  The uneducated people in this country are largely supporting Trump, as his "toughness" is being taken as if he'd be a strong, decisive leader. But this is all bluster.  If we want a country run as if it were a business, one can do much better than choosing a leader who has had his businesses go into bankruptcy 4 times.

Yet, the educated people also have a problem by choosing Sanders.  He is an avowed Socialist in a country that looks skeptically at Socialism.  (His policies would be in the middle of the road in Europe or Canada.  But this is not Europe or even Canada.)  Could he get anything through a GOP controlled congress?  It looks doubtful at best.

One of the TV pundits noted that we're seeing a seismic shift in politics, where one (or both) of the major political parties may fail to survive the next 20 years.  And I think this is a strong possibility. The era at the beginning of the 1900's was very similar to that we have today.  There were financial crises in 1907 and 2008 that business and government were ill-equipped to handle, there were political elites out of touch with the general public, and there were people strongly motivated for radical political change. The election of 1912 is the closest analogy we have to this year's election, and America then had 4 viable candidates who could have been elected President: Roosevelt, Taft, Wilson, and Debs. This year, we have the "establishment" represented by Bush and Clinton, and "revolutionaries" represented by Trump and Sanders.  Will we retreat from this revolution as we did in 1912 when Wilson was elected? Or will we choose that political revolution by voting our elite out of power?  That is the big question to be answered in November - and I hope we choose wisely....

Beware of the politics of bullying

Melissa Harris-Perry, a weekend talk show host on MSNBC, who could have the victim of the politics of bullying.  Recently, some cretin approached her at the Iowa caucuses and started acting in a threatening way. Although the situation had a "happy ending", one can easily understand why people live in fear when they are in the minority. (And in this case, I do not refer to color, as much as I refer to being in ANY minority.)  Bullying people is a tactic which has been used since time immemorial, and will continue to be used until potential victims have ALL the tools to resist bullying.

Compare today's positions of the two major political parties. The Democrats are the more pacifistic party, seeking greater "gun control'.  The GOP is the more bellicose party, defending "gun rights" every chance they get.  So the supporters of our political left and its positions that are more likely to be bullied by people who are a few french fries short of a "Happy Meal".  And, for the most part, we tolerate that.  

Why do potential victims tolerate bullying?  There are many reasons.  For some, they do not wish to stoop to the level of the intellectually incompetent.  For others, they are afraid of being chosen to be sacrificial lambs for the sake of social cohesion.  As I said, there are many reasons, none of them good. It would make more sense for people to stand up to bullies and "go 'all in'".  Yet, this goes against a primal instinct to run in the face of danger.

Recently, a different cretin barged into the offices of a Texas state legislator.  Texas has both open carry and concealed carry. And there are no provisions to keep firearms out of the state capitol, where a few deranged madmen could take down the entire legislative branch of government, as well as its executive, if done at the right time.  As much as I believe that the people must preserve the right and ability to rebel against a tyrannical government, this was hardly the time and place where that right was needed.  This lawmaker had real reason to fear for his life.  And all Texas is doing in response is to put "panic buttons" in legislators' offices - a potential case of "too little, too late."

Sadly, it looks like we're letting the bullies control us.  Hopefully, we won't go down without a good fight....